Plant Medicine Immersion and Integration

Ragde Lobo has been studying with the Cofan indigenous tribe in Colombia for eight years. He has embarked on many extensive retreats in the Amazon and learned their traditional Cofan music. He has been serving the medicine for the past two years. As well as accompanying spiritual seekers and medicine men's ceremonies in Latin America with his songs of power and healing. His music, a vibrant echo of the culture of ancestors and Native American tribes, reminds us of the force of life, of the connection to the earth and of the power of powerful plants and animals. It reminds us of this spiritual power that sleeps in each of us.

Whitney is a facilitator of integration and strives to create a safe container for deep transformations to occur. She has a PhD lever of education in Clinical Psychology and teaches Vipassana Meditation as well as Yoga. Her role during the retreat is organization, integration and teaching meditation. Whitney came to yoga/meditation through a serious of intense injuries and working with difficult death/ loss. She grew up in a high pressure situation, ski racing, and at a young age was racing as a junior olympic athlete where she was ranked 11th in the nation for downhill speed ski racing events. This intense situation and the extreme conditions lead to a series of difficult injuries from her racing career she turned to Meditation and Yoga as a way of healing her body. She soon became a teacher and has been teaching regularly for 18 years. She has been through many trainings and recently attended a 500hr training through Prajna Yoga. She assists at Yoga Journal Conferences with Prajna yoga and Tias Little all over the country. Whitney has also been teaching mindfulness meditation and practicing meditation under the (Mindfulness) Vipassana Theravada lineage for 19 years. Her meditation path deepened while pursuing her PhD in Clinical Psychology she decided, amidst the piles of research, that Mindfulness/meditation was the modality she wanted to research over any other form of psychotherapy. She was also going through a period of time where many close friends and family died which stimulated existential questioning. Through this she left her PhD to focus primarily on Mindfulness, Dharma and Meditation which led her to undertake a series of long retreats where she sat several hundred hours in meditation which inspired the completion of an intensive 2 year dharma leadership training at Spirit Rock Meditation Center.